In August 2006, Chris Jones wrote this intimate portrait of John McCain's quest for the 2008 Republican nomination. Look back at the early, uncertain days of the McCain campaign.

With intimate access to the candidate, Chris Jones has tracked John McCain's fight for the White House in four installments. From these uncertain beginnings in August 2006, to the infighting in January 2008's Part 2, the campaign's comeback in April's Part 3 and finally the real war in this summer's Part 4, the profiles offer the ultimate McCain primer -- and postscript -- for Election Day. Click here for updates from Jones and all of Esquire's election coverage in one place.

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They have stood up and turned their backs on John McCain, about thirty graduating students and faculty of Manhattan's New School university, the sort of progressive institution that awards a master of fine arts in lighting design. About two dozen more are holding up orange signs that read, MCAIN: OUR COMMENCEMENT IS NOT YOUR PLATFORM. McCain can see every one of them from the stage at Madison Square Garden, where the Class of 2006 has gathered to collect its degrees in front of smiling parents and dozens of unsmiling cops, called in following rumors that the Arizona senator -- asked to speak today by the school's president and his old Senate buddy, Bob Kerrey -- risks being lacquered with dog shit before he turns the last page of his speech. It's been a tense few minutes, with the expectation that any one of them might, in hindsight, be made historic. Should his assailant's aim be true, John McCain will become the next president of the United States.

He might anyway, this onetime maverick turned front-runner, perhaps the singular hope for the Republicans to keep their hold on the Oval Office. But his taking dog shit to the chest in front of an audience of New York City liberals could clinch it, galvanizing the fractured right wing behind its disrespected war hero, catapulting him through the party primaries (the races that he will always have the most trouble winning), and finally earning him the White House, probably in a center-right landslide over Hillary Clinton. That dog shit could do for McCain what he has never been able to do for himself: make him appear the victim, and this country has always had a thing for saving, as well as for the saved.

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McCain is smeared even before he has the chance to speak, principally by a longhaired music student named Jean Rohe. After singing a lovely rendition of Jay Mankita's "Living Planet," Rohe tears into the sad-seeming man seated behind her, buttoned up in his academic robe.

The gown drowns him a little, makes him seem even smaller than he is, with his short-fingered hands folded in his lap and a pair of well-worn black shoes on his feet, pointed inward, leaving him looking like a kid in the front row of a class photo. But in other ways, he looks older than he is, which is sixty-nine, and which would make him the oldest inaugurated president in history. He knows there have been whispers about his health. The surgical scar from a nasty case of skin cancer that runs down the left side of his face -- in stretches raised so that it catches the light, and then diving below the surface like a mineral vein -- has cut away some of his former handsomeness. And his white hair is thinner than it once was. Despite that, however, and despite his tendency to squint and wince as if there were a bad taste in his mouth, and despite his stiff, robotic movements, permanent reminders of the nightmares of his youth, McCain can still make himself look hale, strong enough to run through a wall.

Not just now, though. "The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded," Rohe says, drawing loud cheers. "Not only this," she continues, now taking aim at Kerrey, "but his invitation was a top-down decision that did not take into account the desires and interests of the student body on an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all." Whole sections of the crowd have taken to their feet, and they remain on them until the end of Rohe's speech, poised, it seems, for someone to make front pages and possibly even textbooks.

Almost meekly, McCain steps behind the podium to catcalls and scattered, competing applause, as though rain were trying to wash out thunder. "This is a day to bask in praise," he begins, but when even that line earns him jeers, he knows that precious little of it will be heaped upon him this afternoon.

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The body of McCain's speech -- a considered, sometimes arcanely eloquent evocation of tolerance and civility -- is interrupted by hecklers who are bold, loud, and sometimes obscene. As he talks about the arrogance of his younger days ("It's funny now how less self-assured I feel late in life than I did when I lived in perpetual springtime"), the calculus of going to war ("Whether the cause was necessary or not, whether it was just or not, we should all shed a tear for all that is lost when war claims its wages from us"), or even about selfishness ("There is no honor or happiness in just being strong enough to be left alone"), he is shouted down.

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When one man yells, "We're graduating, not voting!" McCain nearly forgets his own message. He thinks to himself, I wouldn't dream of asking for your goddamn vote, and he almost blurts it out, but he bites his tongue, as he must these days, and continues with his prepared remarks. From between the curtains drawn to the side of the stage, where McCain's police escort and his staffers (including John Weaver, the lanky, weary political strategist) have stationed themselves, there comes the collective, palpable wish that McCain skip over the remaining several paragraphs of his speech to the last line: "And thank you very much for the privilege of sharing this great occasion with you."

He does not skip ahead. McCain continues on, looking and sounding more and more defeated with each breath, but continuing still and with occasional beauty. ("America and her ideals helped spare me from the weaknesses of my own character. And I cannot forget it.")

Now, finally, mercifully, he is nearing the end, closing with a story of his friendship with a militant anti-Vietnam War activist named David Ifshin, these two young men who had butted heads until their sharpest edges had been softened. "I realized he had not been my enemy but my countryman...my countryman...and later my friend. His friendship honored me," McCain says. "David remained my countryman and my friend until the day of his death, at the age of forty-seven, when he left a loving wife and three beautiful children--"

At which point, a kid in the crowd points at McCain and cackles.

Weaver hears it. The cops and security guards hear it. A few of the dozens of reporters in attendance hear it. Together, they tense, thinking at once, Here comes the dog shit.

But it does not come. Instead, McCain continues unmolested -- physically, at least -- wobbling to a tired, tepid finish. "And may God bless you, Class of 2006," he says, trying to sound as though he means it. "The world does indeed await you, and humanity is impatient for your service. Take good care of that responsibility. Everything depends on it.

"And thank you very much for the privilege of sharing this great occasion with you."

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McCain takes his seat again, looking smaller than he did when he left it -- looking, even without the aid of that dog shit, like a man who needs to be saved after all.

After a few painful minutes, he is rescued, locked away in the back of an elevator, heading for his SUV in the bowels of Madison Square Garden. For the duration of the ride down, McCain is left staring at the vast space between the shoulder blades of some of the biggest cops in New York. It's a quarterback's view of his offensive line.

They clear a path and bundle him into the backseat. A pair of them jump into the front and prepare for a hasty exit. McCain puts on a pair of dark sunglasses and pulls out his phone. He dials up his wife, Cindy, who is waiting anxiously back in Arizona.

"Yeah, it was pretty rough," he tells her, but he does his best to sound upbeat, so that she won't worry. In odd-numbered years, he gets home to Phoenix just about every weekend, which is good and important for both of them. Now he's lucky if he gets back every other weekend. Heading into the fall and the midterm elections, once a month might be all they can hope for.

"I miss you, honey," he says before hanging up.

Weaver is sitting next to him. He asks his boss gently if he heard the student laughing. McCain is quiet. He did not, apparently. "I'm glad I didn't," he says after a long beat. "That could have been very bad."

The SUV threads its way across busy Thirty-fourth Street, guided by a police car on its way to open road and a private, suppertime fundraiser in Darien, Connecticut. He can expect a happier reception there. But it is more than an hour away, and in the back of that truck, it feels as though it will be a long one.

"You did a good job soldiering through," Weaver says.

"Yeah, well, it would've been news if I didn't," McCain says. And there is silence once again.

The senator's ride slips onto the expressway. The pace of escape picks up. The last of Manhattan's skyscrapers disappear in the rearview, giving way first to brown-brick low-rises, and then to single-family homes, and then, finally, to stands of green trees. The mood lightens along with the traffic. Soon, the lead car pulls away, ripping off its sirens in salute, leaving McCain's SUV unattended for the rest of the trip. It feels as though there is room again to breathe. There is room for conversation.

"Do I want to be president?" McCain says. "Sure I do. But the real question is, Do I want to run for it? And do I think I can win?"

Given today's unhappy start -- given the absence of history-defining dog shit, for starters -- perhaps this afternoon isn't the best time to begin the search for answers. Then again, perhaps it is.

little less than a week earlier, McCain had given the same speech to a different America. At the invitation of Jerry Falwell, McCain stood before ten thousand polite, well-scrubbed evangelical Christians who had filled a basketball arena at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to the tits. The graduating students among them had attended church three times each week for the entirety of their education, during which they had been taught that abortion, homosexuality, socialism, and political correctness were sins to be stamped out.

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Like their New School counterparts, they stood when McCain took his place behind the podium, but they did so to greet him with applause. (The only sign held up in the audience read TIE YOR SHOES!, apparently directed toward an apparently absentminded student by his apparently spelling-impaired family.) It was not a raucous ovation; instead, it was an orderly sort of mass appreciation, but still, it felt complete.

It also felt as though McCain's message of civility fell upon more receptive ears than it would at the New School, a bit of a surprise, optimistic somehow, considering how McCain was greeted in parts such as these only six years ago. Back in 2000, when McCain was stopped cold by George Bush in the ugly, bitter South Carolina primary, his defeat was largely Falwell's work.

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"I didn't campaign against John McCain; I campaigned for George Bush," Falwell had said a few days earlier. "And after John won New Hampshire, we just had to pull out all the stops." Those pulled stops -- which were dusted for fingerprints that could never be traced -- included "push polls" suggesting that McCain was the father of an illegitimate black baby and that his wife was a drug addict. ("It was as nasty a thing as I've ever been involved in, and I've been involved in some nasty campaigns," Weaver says.) Not long after, a furious McCain cleared his throat in front of a crowd of supporters in Virginia. "That's when he shot us between the eyes," Falwell said.

What McCain said, exactly, was, "Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the Left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the Right."

It was a bridge-burning moment. For more than five years, Falwell and McCain did not speak to each other, until last September, when Falwell put a call in to McCain's office in Washington, D.C., and asked for a meeting. It was granted. According to both men, a short time was spent airing out their differences. The rest of their time together was spent making plans for the future, including Falwell's request that McCain come to speak to the students at Liberty. McCain immediately said that he would.

"People always ask me if I'm still mad about what happened in 2000," McCain says now as his SUV continues along the green road to Connecticut. "What in the world is the point of being mad at something that happened six years ago? Did I like it? No. Was I angry at the time? Yes. Did I spend ten wonderful days after I lost feeling sorry for myself? Yes. There's nothing better than feeling sorry for yourself. But there's no point to it, either. I mean, how would it sound if I said, 'Dear citizens of Arizona: I'd like to run for reelection and represent you in the United States Senate. By the way, I'm still pissed off over South Carolina, so I'm sure you'll understand when I spend a lot of my time getting even.' It's over."

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But nothing is so simple as that in the life of John McCain. Before his lusty reception at the New School, his visit to Liberty University had been among his most dissected public appearances in months, perhaps years. It was seen as his taking a hard, calculated turn to the Right, embracing those same intolerant agents he had once shunned -- and been shunned by -- for the cynical sake of political expediency.

If true, McCain's pandering failed to have its desired effect. Falwell stopped short of endorsing his guest, who left for a flight to Salt Lake City even before the students had received their degrees. "Every now and then he gets on this global-warming kick. And there are a lot of other great guys and gals out there," Falwell said, ticking off the holy trinity of George Allen, Mitt Romney, and Bill Frist.

In the days that followed, McCain remained equally noncommittal, refusing to make the jump from like to love.

His SUV pulls up to a mammoth redbrick pile with cedar-shake shingles in Darien, the sort of home where even the nursery has an en suite bath. "Some house," McCain says. In a large reception room, the one with the grand piano in it, McCain's hosts, John and Linda Tavlarios and their children -- the boys are each named after an English king -- and perhaps thirty or forty of Connecticut's uppermost crust are waiting for him. Together, they have conspired to give McCain about $150,000 for the pleasure of his company.

In exchange, McCain begins expertly working the room, using first names lifted from name tags, before taking his position in front of the fireplace for a short speech. He is skilled at these, seeming both off-the-cuff and practiced, part stand-up comedian and part preacher. "Hillary Clinton wants everyone to have a home," he begins with a jolt. "I want everyone to have a home like this one."

But he turns serious soon enough. For weeks, McCain has plugged the immigration-reform package that he put together with Ted Kennedy and that will be voted on in the Senate next week. He has been attacked for creating a path to what he calls "earned citizenship" -- his critics call it amnesty -- but now it's his turn to go on the offensive. "Are we a xenophobic, nativist country?" he asks. "Everybody in this room has an ancestor who came here for the same reason these people came here." Taking sips from their glasses of white wine, many of those standing next to the piano nod, suddenly one with the Mexicans.

Now McCain springboards into a tougher sell: Iraq. He was one of the authors of the resolution that allowed President Bush to go to war, and he stands by that. He still believes the cause is right. He's argued that even if Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction, he would have had them one day soon, and he would have used them. He wants you to know that the world is a better place without Hussein's portrait hanging on walls.

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He also believes that the war has been botched badly. "I don't blame Bush," he says. "I blame Rumsfeld. It's his failure that we didn't have enough troops in Iraq, because he ignored the advice of the military. We never had enough troops over there from the beginning, and that's where most of our problems come from."

It's a heavy topic for a Friday evening in Darien. Time for another joke, this one about John Kerry's offer to make him vice-president in 2004. "When I was in Vietnam," McCain says, "I was tied up, kept in the dark, fed scraps. Why would I want to do that again?"

His audience suitably primed, he asks for questions; surprisingly, they are not kind, a dissent more telling than the New School's. The first complaint comes from a portly man with a terrific head of slick gray hair. He confesses that after nearly forty-five years as a proud Republican, he recently attended his first Democratic fundraiser; so did his smoking ex-model second wife. He can't understand why Bush is picking fights with everybody and why the old platform of fiscal responsibility -- the last six years have seen the most explosive federal-spending spree since the Great Society -- has been sacrificed. A woman reclining on a chesterfield sees her opportunity to join the upset chorus. "I don't see why we're telling gays they can't marry," she interrupts. "I thought Republicans stood for keeping government out of our lives."

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McCain nods. He knows that with Bush's approval ratings having reached near-record lows, this room is the broad base that the president's been losing. "When you get down to the twenties," McCain likes to say, "you're talking about paid staffers and blood relatives." If he is going to win the White House, these are the people he must coax back into the fold. Moderate Republicans, independents, centrists: He needs every last one of them to see in him what they want to see.

"I understand the frustrations a lot of Republicans feel," McCain says. "We're not representing their hopes and dreams and aspirations. We worry about Ms. Schiavo before we worry about balancing the budget. We're going to take up this Family Marriage Amendment again. Why? The Republicans will vote one way, and the Democrats will vote another, and everybody knows it! It's pointless. I've never seen Washington as polarized as it is today."

Which reminds him...

"I would never say this publicly, but some of these talk-show hosts -- and I'm not saying they should be taken off the air; they have the right to do what they want to do -- I don't think they're good for America."

Which brings him to...

"I urge my friends who complain about the influence of the religious Right, get out there and get busy. That's what they do! Now, if we believe in the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the big-tent party, then we have to get out there and show that. The fact is, some of us have sat idly by while those very active people have basically set the agenda for our party. I get attacked every day because I'm working with Ted Kennedy. How can I work with Kennedy? Because I want to get something done!"

And last, full circle...

"I think the biggest mistake we could make is to underestimate Hillary Clinton. She's smart and she's tough. She's very disciplined in all ways -- unlike her husband -- and I think she's formidable. Plus, she already has $20 million in the bank. If we don't get our act together..."

There it is. McCain has finally laid it out, the choice this country, in all likelihood, will soon have to make. For all his stubborn coyness about his presidential aspirations -- "I'm going to wait until next year to decide" -- McCain knows that he will be taking a second run at the White House, and he will probably be taking it against Mrs. Clinton. For him, it's already become more than just another election. He believes that the stakes are even higher than the last time he ran, that his country might be going to pieces, and that he is the one man who might bring it together. He also believes that time is running out, not because he is growing old -- or not just because he is growing old -- but because our politics and even our sense of common identity have degenerated so quickly. The fact is, John McCain believes we are the ones who need saving, not him.

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Even with his audience's prodding, he refuses to speak ill of Mrs. Clinton. But in his artful, seasoned way, McCain has given his audience his considered sales pitch for his brand of hawkish, no-bullshit conservatism, marbled with just enough compassion and reason and bipartisanship to set him apart from other Republican breast beaters. Tonight in Connecticut, McCain is of Connecticut. Tomorrow he will be of Delaware, and on Sunday he will be of Maine. McCain's greatest wish is to be all things to all people, impossible to slot on the traditional political spectrum, making it just as impossible -- even if his line of thinking does not always coincide with your own -- not to find something in him to admire. He will concede New York City and the New School to Hillary. The rest of the country, he believes, can be made his, just as he has come to own this room, the applause as loud as the rancor was this afternoon.

It's well after dark when McCain heads for the airport, where a small plane, six leather seats, and a drawer full of drinks await him.

The plane is a symbol. In 1989, McCain was caught up in the savings-and-loan scandal, one of five senators who had accepted a total of $1.4 million in campaign contributions from Charles Keating, who was being investigated for his role in the collapse of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association. In exchange for the donations, the senators were to use their influence to take the heat off their benefactor. The Senate Ethics Committee later found that McCain played an insignificant role in the influence-peddling scheme, but he remained stained by the episode, both in public and in private. To cleanse himself, he began working toward sweeping campaign-finance reform. "The system was designed to make good people do bad things and bad people worse," he says today. Along with Democrat Russ Feingold, he wrote 2002's Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or the McCain-Feingold Bill, perhaps his greatest success as a legislator.

In some ways, however, McCain again failed. He had fought hard against the accepted method of travel for high-level politicians: corporate jets. Wishing to fly from Washington, D.C., to Memphis, for instance, a senator can hitch a ride on the plane owned by Federal Express. In return, he must pay the equivalent of a first-class ticket (not nearly the cost of the flight) and pretend to listen to the company flack assigned to him, a ready-made sequel to Snakes on a Plane. McCain still believes this to be a corrupting practice, and he sought to end it. But his colleagues resisted, and no law was ever adopted. Today, it applies only to McCain.

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The instant he steps on a corporate jet, he will be labeled the worst kind of hypocrite, and for a man who claims to lead the straight-talk express, that would be death. So he has effectively denied himself a perk of the job, one more lash in his continued penance for being a member of the Keating Five. He must dip into his own office's coffers for a flight such as this one, a short hop through the night to White Plains, New York.

It isn't all bad. His flights are his respites, occupied by a comforting routine. He reads -- at the moment, he is deep into Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq; "It's just devastating," he says -- catches some needed sleep, and distracts himself with frivolous things, usually sports. ("I admire Craig Counsell a great deal," he says, talking of the slight Arizona Diamondbacks shortstop who refuses to wear batting gloves. "I think he'll be a big-league manager someday.")

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And as usual, there is an odd intimacy among the small group on board, often no more than a couple of longtime aides like Weaver. They share the newspaper, a couple of Heinekens, small talk. Tonight, shortly before touchdown, McCain becomes aware that his hair is standing up. "John," he says to Weaver, "I think my hair is out of place." He announces this out loud because he cannot lift his arms above his shoulders. Weaver, casually dressed and a soft-spoken Texas gentleman, reaches across the aisle and delicately runs his hand across the top of McCain's head, smoothing it. There is a tenderness in the gesture, as there is whenever Weaver straightens McCain's collar or brushes the lint from his jacket. There is tenderness, but there is also a kind of sadness.

At the bottom of the stairs, McCain is greeted by John Sweeney, a hard-right Republican congressman in a tough race for reelection in New York's twentieth district. Sweeney is a bear-sized Irishman with a high forehead and a baritone voice; on behalf of Bush, he helped stop the 2000 recount in Miami, earning him the nickname "Congressman Kickass." But now he is on the verge of getting his own ass kicked, dragged down like every other Republican by his president's approval ratings and a few mistakes of his own, including his appearance at a frat party where he reportedly pushed back too many Keystone Lights. Tonight he has called in the cavalry, and the cavalry has arrived in the form of John McCain.

They man-hug and climb into a car for the ride to the hotel. It is late, and McCain is starting to feel heavy-lidded, but he begins peppering Sweeney with the names of local members of Congress and wonders aloud how each is faring. For every name that McCain rattles off -- "How's Sue? How's Walsh? What about Reynolds?" -- Sweeney answers with doom.

"I think the whole state's in play," he says.

McCain knows this to be true, and he nods.

A big part of the problem, Sweeney says, is Governor George Pataki: "He's checked out, and everybody knows it. Plus, there's still that big hole in Manhattan. You know what his approval rating is? Twenty-nine."

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"Twenty-nine?" McCain says.

Pataki has long been rumored to want to run for the Republican presidential nomination, to run against McCain long before either man will get his chance to run against Hillary Clinton. By Jesus, there will be blood in the sawdust on the floors in New York. In 2000, Pataki worked hard to keep McCain off party ballots across the state. That led to McCain's stopping his campaign bus in front of the Russian consulate in New York City and shouting, "Comrade Pataki, give us our ballots!" McCain eventually won a place in a race that he went on to lose in part because of Pataki -- but also, interestingly, because of John Sweeney, who campaigned aggressively for Bush. Sweeney has been forgiven for his sins, after he supported McCain in his fight to rid baseball of steroids and to find better body armor for the troops in Iraq, but Pataki has not.

"I don't know anyone with a twenty-nine," McCain says, "who thinks he can make a run for president."

Following big bites of waffles and bacon the next morning at a buffet in the hotel lobby ("By the way," he says, looking very pleased, "guess who got the game-winning hit against the Braves last night? Craig Counsell"), McCain films a commercial for Sweeney, who watches anxiously from a corner, dreaming of an uptick. Next, he submits to a press conference in front of a bank of cameras, Sweeney hovering over his shoulder, making sure he is in every shot. One of the reporters asks Sweeney why he now seems so close to McCain, despite having taken Bush's side so staunchly only six years ago.

"Well," Sweeney says, "I was wrong."

A fundraiser follows for Congressman Kissass. In a backroom, there is a long line of people who have paid $500 to have McCain shake their hands and pose for pictures. One of those in line who has not paid for the privilege is Scott Richards, a forty-year-old Army sergeant from Pleasant Valley dressed in military fatigues, with his wife and four children around him. His truck was blown up when he was delivering a load of fuel in Karsch, Iraq, a blast he very nearly didn't survive, and this morning he received the Purple Heart. Sweeney wanted to present it to Richards along with McCain in front of the cameras, but McCain politely declined: "No fucking way," he said the night before, his gentle way of letting Sweeney know that he will sell out only so much of himself for the cause.

McCain keeps his own collection of medals -- a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, a Distinguished Flying Cross, and his own Purple Heart -- under wraps, although he is reminded of his exploits as a naval aviator at most of his public appearances, usually during the glowing introductions given by his hosts. On October 26, 1967, he was shot down over Vietnam and held prisoner for more than five years, mostly at the Hanoi Hilton. As the son and grandson of Navy admirals, he was offered early release, but he refused it. Instead, McCain, who had already broken both of his arms and a leg in ejecting from his plane, was beaten and tortured. After being caught trying to hang himself, he broke down and signed a confession that continues to haunt him: "I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate." Even now, nearly forty years later, he is reluctant to talk about it, except to say, "I have never considered myself a hero, because I failed in some ways." For him, Vietnam is not the stuff of political capital. Rather, it is the reason why he cannot raise his arms high enough to comb his own hair.

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All of which explains why, when McCain congratulates Sergeant Richards on his Purple Heart this morning, he does so out of sight and in whispers.

A less orderly meeting awaits in nearby Brunswick, at the Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks, lodge number 2556, where a picnic has been put together by Joe Bruno, the state-senate majority leader and perhaps New York's most powerful grassroots Republican. Bruno -- a strong-jawed, thirty-year senator -- and about a thousand of his supporters have been waiting in a steady rain to shake McCain's hand or touch him on the elbow. These folks will do whatever Bruno asks of them, and given the "graciousness of today's visit," he is exactly the sort of man who will one day ask them to vote early and often for John McCain.

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To repay the favor, McCain poses for photographs and stops to sign some of his best-selling books, Faith of My Fathers and Character Is Destiny, which the fortunate few take back from him and clutch to their chests like bibles. After Bruno's Mount Sinai introduction, McCain grabs the microphone and bursts into his routine, telling the same jokes and giving the same "straight talk" about the same hot-button issues, hearing the same laughter and the same generous applause in return. It is like watching the same movie on a different set.

There is something almost rhythmic in watching him when he gets on a roll on the road like this, a steady beat that begins to feel driving. He can feel it, too. You can see that he can. You can see that he loves this, loves the attention, loves the kind words, loves the look that the people give him when he's worked his way through to them. These are not rich folks who have been soaked through waiting for him, and they are not powerful. But they are the sort who take care of their friends, holding up signs that say OUR JOE BRUNO, and in ten minutes McCain has made himself one of them. Even in the rain there is warmth.

He is smiling when he slips back into the car, having been followed the entire way by a deep, adoring mob. Out of sight, he finds a bottle of hand sanitizer, a must-have on the campaign trail. He waves his clean mitts through the window while his car eases out of the crowd and onto the road, on its way to the airport, its passenger on his way to Delaware, where he will do it all over again.

There, he will stand near Dewey Beach, washed clean by the ocean, under blue skies instead of gray, and he will appear beside that state's lone congressman, Mike Castle, who is the chairman of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a collection of the party's moderates. There, Castle will welcome McCain at the Georgetown airport, the way John Sweeney did in White Plains, and the two men will share secrets in the backseat of a black sedan. And there, McCain will hear Castle -- the same Mike Castle who wrote the bill to lift the limits on stem-cell research, pro-choice Mike Castle -- suggest that he will endorse him in his run for the White House:

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"You take a walk in Washington with ninety-five of this country's senators, and nobody would have any idea who they were. Everybody knows who he is. I admire his forthrightness. Some people, you wonder whether they're ideologically driven, whether they're saying what they're saying because they're Right or Left. But he's not like that. When he says something, you're almost always inclined to believe him and to believe that he's correct. I think that makes him very electable. I think there will be other good and viable candidates, but I'm not sure any of them are as qualified to run for president of the United States, and I'm not sure any of them can answer the question of whether they can win against someone like Hillary Clinton."

There it will be again. Not the foreshadowing of elections to come or yet another accounting of the stakes. No, it'll be the same pledge of support that McCain has just received from hard-right John Sweeney and from old-school Joe Bruno, this time from moderate Mike Castle.

The plane is waiting for him. "How ya doin', honey?" McCain says, using the drive to the airport in Albany to call up Cindy again. She tells him about her visit to Annapolis to see their son Jack, one of his seven children by his two wives, and who, like his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, is enrolled at the Naval Academy. Unlike his father, who finished fifth from the bottom of his class, Jack is doing well in school, keeping out of trouble, and looking good in his white uniform. "Was it beautiful?" McCain asks, and Cindy answers yes, it was, and he is even happier now, downright springy. "I don't know what's wrong with that kid," he says after hanging up. "He didn't get a single demerit."

McCain climbs on board with Weaver, who is his own version of buoyant. "That was huge for us," he says of Bruno's show of support.

"Yeah, that was great," McCain says. "We won't have to sue to get on the ballot this time around."

Upstate New York, beachside Delaware, the rain and the sun, the conservatives and the moderates, and by nightfall -- when he'll be back in his Crystal City, Virginia, apartment and drop into bed -- all of it will feel as though it's McCain's to win or lose, the end of another long day, and the start of everything coming together.

Early Sunday morning, outside the Fox-network studios in Washington, D.C., two polished black SUVs lurch to a halt and double-park. Flanked by a half dozen members of the Secret Service and dressed in cream, Condoleezza Rice steps out and heads inside. She is the first guest on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. McCain, who has not yet arrived, will be the second.

Before Rice steps back outside after taping her interview (McCain will go live), two members of her security team sweep the sidewalks. It's impossible to escape their attention.

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"You aren't going to try to ask any questions, are you?" one of them doesn't so much ask as he instructs.

Satisfied, the scouts nod to their colleagues. In a rush, Rice and company leap out and make the dash to the SUVs. As they climb in and pull away, one of the truck's rear windows is lowered to reveal the nose of a machine gun. The cracking sound of its cocking lever is louder than the noise of the engines.

Moments later, McCain rounds the corner on foot. By his side is Mark Salter, his longtime chief of staff, a quiet, bespectacled man who looks at his feet when he walks. They have already been busy reviewing the questions that McCain will probably be asked. These days, it's important to be prepared.

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"How ya doin', Nancy?" McCain says to the woman holding the makeup brush, submitting to yet another vain effort to try to soften his scar.

In the greenroom, Bill Kristol of the conservative Weekly Standard stops by, and he and McCain, taking a hit of coffee, shoot the shit for a while. It is a chummy conversation; if there were any doubts whether this is friendly territory, the photographs on the wall of Bill Frist, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld allay them.

McCain talks to Kristol mostly about immigration reform, about the rival bill coming out of the House of Representatives specifically. "You can't pass laws like that," McCain says. "If a young woman is here illegally, and she gets raped and goes to see rape-crisis counselors, then this would make them guilty of a felony. It enrages me."

Just then, Wallace appears. In the words of Charlie Murphy, dude has a big fucking head. "We're delighted to have you," he says to McCain, passing him a thick book filled with the signatures of his guests. McCain takes a seat with the book on his lap, pulls his ever-present black Sharpie marker out of his jacket pocket, and turns to a clean page.

"Thanks for the interrogation," he begins, before he decides that interrogation is spelled wrong. (It is not.) "How do you spell interrogation?" he shouts to Salter, who mixes up the number of r's and g's in response. McCain scribbles out his opening salvo and tries again. "That doesn't look right," he says, realizing that he was on target the first time around. "Asshole," he says to Salter, starting a third attempt.

"Oh, God, this is my potato moment," McCain says, and everybody in the room laughs. By the time it passes, he has taken up an entire page of Wallace's book with underscores and arrows and strike-throughs and exclamation points. It looks like a plan for invading Iran.

"Ermp," he says, staring at his latest canvas.

It's a quirky, gruff little sound he makes, coming up from the back of his throat, through puffed cheeks, and pushed out of his pursed mouth. It comes out of him whenever he's made an unforced error -- after wading into the wrong gaggle of reporters, after giving too frank an answer: ermp.

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He is called to the set, a hot little box with an expensive view of the Capitol dome. McCain settles into his chair and submits himself to Wallace's rapid-fire questions for twelve minutes. Back in the greenroom, where Salter stands silently, watching his man on TV, it feels like forever.

There are no real surprises, except for a brief, risky detour back into the darkness of South Carolina. The unlikely push comes from a clip of an angry man railing against McCain's stance on the Family Marriage Amendment. Wallace identifies the man as Richard Land. "If he doesn't change his mind and support this amendment," Land says, "he will have a virtually impossible task to win the Republican nomination."

Blowing off the guy in the clip, McCain reaffirms his opposition to the amendment (arguing that marriage is not a federal responsibility), adding, "I've found in my life that when I do what I think is right...it always turned out in the end okay. When I do things for political expediency, which I have from time to time, it's always turned out poorly."

Wallace asks for an example of the latter.

"I went down to South Carolina [in 2000] and said that the flag that was flying over the state capitol, which was a Confederate flag -- that I shouldn't be involved in it; it was a state issue."

At first, he had taken a far different position, calling the flag "a symbol of racism and slavery" on Face the Nation. But John Weaver shit a brick afterward, and that night the two prepared a statement that McCain would read the next day with visible reluctance: "As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides. Some view it as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage."

Now, with Wallace staring him down, McCain sums up the episode, the wounds suddenly fresh again: "It was an act of cowardice," he says.

"Act of cowardice on your part?" Wallace says.

"Yes."

Things hang still for a moment, in the studio and in the greenroom, before McCain recovers. "That was a very strong lesson for me," he says. "But I can tell you that I know the difference between right and wrong."

The interview ends, and McCain is in the elevator back down to the street, looking at Salter for approval.

"You were good," Salter says.

"I didn't mean to get into the whole flag thing," McCain says, almost apologetically.

"You were good," Salter says again. "I'd tell you if you weren't."

The elevator stops, and the doors open.

"Who's Richard Land?" McCain asks before leaving.

"Oh, he's just the head of the Southern Baptist Convention," Salter says.

"Ermp."

But that little fumble is quickly forgotten by that afternoon, as he takes a solo flight up the rocky coast to Maine. There he is met by another of his staffers, Mike Dennehy, a young guy with a wide smile and a raspy voice. "How ya doin', you little jerk?" McCain says by way of greeting.

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McCain has the peculiar habit of expressing affection with invectives, starting with jerk, rising on up through crazy bastard, and culminating with asshole. "If he's not calling you terrible names, he doesn't like you," says Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of his best political friends.

He's come to Portland because of a couple of assholes: big, loud Dave Emery, who campaigned for McCain here in 2000 (not easy, given the Bush family's connections to Kennebunkport) and who is now taking a stab at becoming governor; and Greg Stevens, a communications expert who's recovering from what should have been terminal brain cancer. In the way that McCain expects his friends to take care of him, he takes care of his friends, and he greets Emery and Stevens warmly at the local Marriott, where he is swept into a room that's been turned into a makeshift TV studio.

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McCain takes a quick glance at the script for the commercial he's about to film for Emery, and he shakes his head. "I can tell just by looking at it, I'll never get that into thirty seconds." Some hurried editing takes place, most of it guided by McCain: "Instead of 'real long hard look,' how about we say 'good look'? And that opening line -- 'I sure know I can't tell you how to vote' -- let's scratch that. Let's just keep it simple: 'I'm John McCain.' That other stuff is kind of hokey."

"You used to say that other stuff all the time," Stevens says.

But today's John McCain isn't yesterday's. He's more polished, more controlled, a little smoother, less ragged seeming. "Smarter," he calls it. "It would be only natural and logical, when I first got this blaze of publicity and attention, that I would be less thoughtful than I should have been and sometimes say stupid things. I still do that, but not nearly with the frequency I used to. It's not that I'm less frank. I've just learned that you have to think a little bit about what you say."

Having done his thinking, he now reads through the script out loud, once, for practice. "The only thing I'd suggest," Stevens says, "is that you try to sound a little happier."

"Got it," McCain says, and he does. The first time he reads the script for tape, he nails it. He's found the right pitch, the right language, and the right intonation, and he's found all of it in 28.5 seconds.

Not accustomed to keeping first takes, the TV crew isn't quite sure what to do next. McCain knows. He's out the goddamn door. Next he will brace himself for another grip-and-grin -- get out the hand sanitizer, Dennehy -- and then he will give another speech. "The good news is, we have enough money to fund Dave's campaign," he says. "The bad news is, most of it is still in your wallets and purses." Next he will catch a ride back to the airport, lifting off two hours after he landed. [On June 13, Emery would lose his bid in the Republican primary.]

There is a line of sinister black thunderheads between McCain and Manchester, New Hampshire, between him and his dinner, his bed at the Radisson, his night spent watching the Phoenix Suns and the Los Angeles Clippers, and his breakfast with the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women (who look exactly as foxy as they sound). Even the pilots appear a little nervous about challenging the storm head-on, but McCain is unmoved. "You don't have to worry so long as you're flying with me, boys," he says. "If I was meant to die in a plane crash, it would have happened a long time ago."

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Fortunately, McCain's airborne luck holds, and the plane touches down under evening skies that are just beginning to break up. His mood matching the forecast, McCain proposes dinner out. He ends up walking through the doors of an out-of-the-way place called Cotton, upscale without being stuffy. Like every good mafioso, he heads for a booth at the end of a row, where he takes the inside seat, his back flat against the corner. From there, he can see whenever a curious face turns his way.

"It's humbling, it's gratifying, and it still surprises me a bit," he says of his celebrity. "Most of the time, the loser fades into obscurity. But because we ran the kind of campaign that captured the imagination of a lot of people, we've had a lasting impact."

Over meat loaf and all-you-can-eat mashed potatoes, McCain consents to casting back six years, when this was the birthplace of his national presence, the power and the personality. He remembers his collection of good-luck charms, the pockets full of feathers and stones that grew with each stop, and he remembers the people who joined his caravan along the way -- the enamored volunteers, the equally enamored reporters -- and stayed until the end of the road. He remembers the long rides on the bus in between, the ribald conversations that carried them over the miles, the vodka and the dirty jokes, the laughter that bent him over double until he could barely breathe. (He's laughing so hard now, remembering, that he's hard to understand.) He remembers the feeling that something magical was happening, that if only they could sustain the love and energy with which they charged out of the gate, it might lift them to such great heights. He remembers, especially, a town called Peterborough.

"In the middle of the summer we went there," he says more than a little dreamily, "and we wanted to have a town-hall meeting. I've always liked those. We would have as many as six town-hall meetings a day, ninety minutes each. Anyway, we stopped in Peterborough to have one. And to get people to come, we gave away free ice cream. About twenty people showed up for this ice-cream social with Senator John McCain. Well, the night before the primary, the last town-hall meeting also happened to be in Peterborough. And it was packed. They had to put loudspeakers up for the crowd outside. Fun? You bet that was fun. You could just feel this momentum. It just felt like everything was coming together."

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The way it felt yesterday, the way it will feel again next week, when his immigration bill will pass, when, after his colleagues vote in favor of cloture -- in favor of limiting further debate and voting on this difficult, tempestuous thing -- he will stand in front of a gang of reporters alongside an unlikely coalition: senators Graham, Specter, Martinez, and Obama, shoulder to shoulder, and they will heap the praise on him that the students of the New School and hundreds of angry citizens on his office phones did not. And from a side door, in will lumber another senator, big and stooped and white haired, looking like a whaling ship somehow, cruising slowly toward its target: rival and friend John McCain.

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Even in that loud, chaotic room, there will be an evident chemistry between them, born of some shared history as Capitol Hill behemoths, but also, rare these obnoxious days, of battles resolved. Without saying a word, Ted Kennedy will slowly dock next to McCain, take the papers that McCain is holding rolled up in his hand, and in his shaky script write triumphantly: 72-23.

McCain will look down at the numbers (later officially revised to 73-25) and smile, almost gratefully, at the sort of lopsided tally that's possible only when Washington, D.C., confuses itself with Brunswick, New York, picnicking in the rain.

And when it forgets, too, about South Carolina, forgets about that moment when everything fell apart: not for McCain's presidential aspirations alone, but also for the country, as though now, over meat loaf and mashed potatoes, 1999 seems the last best time. Because by 2000 -- by South Carolina, by Michigan, by Arizona -- we had already started playing Right versus Left, red state versus blue state, Rush Limbaugh versus Al Franken, the Minutemen versus the Dixie Chicks, Roe Again versus Wade Again, the church versus the state, "Mission Accomplished" versus Abu Ghraib, the Homeland versus the Constitution, Liberty University versus the New School, us versus them, us versus us. John McCain knows this, knows that his reputation was born just when some vital part of the country died, and now we are nearing the days when he must risk it all over again and hope that this time around the finish is different -- different for him, different for America. He fears that time is running out for both. He knows that already it may be too late for him, for his wrecked and aging body, and, in his more pessimistic moments, possibly too late for the country. Even to consider running, to do for two years what he has done for the past few days, he must continue to believe that he's the one man who can save us. That's why John McCain would like to tell you a story -- and why he would like for you to listen to it -- his story of countrymen and friendship, of reconciliation with David Ifshin and with Vietnam, the country that saw to it that he would never again be able to comb his own hair, and he would like to tell you that all wounds can heal, that all memories can be made good, and that every state can be New Hampshire, in the middle of summer, enjoying an ice-cream social with Senator John McCain. And because of who he is -- or perhaps because he is saying exactly what you need to hear -- you're inclined to believe him and to believe that he's correct.

McCAIN'S TEXAN

Like all things of consequence, John McCain's first run for the presidency was mapped out on the back of a bar napkin. The man holding the pen was John Weaver, who remains McCain's chief political strategist. They met while working on behalf of Phil Gramm's failed 1996 presidential campaign. "I saw how he communicated in a way that people responded to," Weaver says today. During a break from another campaign, in Alabama, Weaver sketched out how this maverick Arizona senator might win the White House, a plan he presented to McCain in early 1997. "He said thank you very much, but he said it with a skeptical eye," Weaver says. "He wouldn't run just because some yahoo from Texas was urging him to."

As usual, Weaver's running late. He's also looking uncomfortable. He rarely consents to interviews. "It's not about me," he says. He has hunched his considerable height over a table in a Washington, D.C., bar and ordered a beer and a basket of french fries, which he's picking at, his Livestrong bracelet sliding up and down his wrist. He looks tired, probably because he is.

He wears the bracelet supporting cancer survivors because he is one, barely. In 2002, at forty-two, he was diagnosed with a particularly virulent strain of leukemia. McCain and his wife even flew Weaver and his teenage daughter out to their ranch in Arizona for a farewell Thanksgiving dinner. "I'll never forget that," Weaver says, the only time the normally laconic Texan's voice breaks.

Two years later, in the fall of 2004, Weaver was finally told that he had made a miracle comeback. Like all cancer survivors, part of him has to keep the rest of his life in check, breath-holding. Like all political strategists, at least he's used to it.

Back in 1997, three weeks after he heard Weaver's plan, McCain decided to run and summoned Weaver to Washington. Using lessons they had learned during the Gramm debacle -- "Make it a cause bigger than yourself; show that there's some passion involved," Weaver says -- McCain went on to beat George Bush in the New Hampshire primary by nineteen points.

Then came South Carolina, where things took an ugly turn. "Uglier to us, because we lost," Weaver says. He doesn't sound bitter exactly. He sounds like someone who is accustomed to wounds. But that loss probably stands as Weaver's biggest, effectively ending McCain's campaign. "I think we could have won, and we should have won," he says, taking another pull from his beer.

The fallout was unusually significant for Weaver, who found that his work with Republicans had mysteriously dried up. "I think in the views of some people" -- Weaver does not name names, but if he did, Bush politico Karl Rove would be one of them -- "the battle was still going on, and many of my current and former clients were encouraged not to use my services."

Angry and unemployed, Weaver for a time worked exclusively for Democrats (except for his continued relationship with McCain), until he was diagnosed with his leukemia in August 2002. He claims to have little memory of his dying years. His lifetime's worth of battles blurred into one.

In 2008, they will again. "This time, we're our own main rival," he says. "If we can dispatch that guy, we'll be in good shape."

Weaver suddenly looks more anxious than tired, and he orders another round.